Pope Francis Picks ‘Heretical’ Anti-Trump Cardinal as Archbishop of Washington
Tit-for-tat appointment follows president-elect’s nomination of papal critic as Vatican ambassador
Pope Francis has nominated Cardinal Robert Walter McElroy, a highly unorthodox prelate and a fierce critic of President-Elect Donald Trump, as archbishop of Washington, just two weeks before Trump begins his second term.
McElroy, who has been accused of covering up Satanic ritual clerical sex abuse, is seen as a leading progressive in the U.S. Catholic hierarchy, calling for the “radical inclusion” of LGBTQ+ Catholics in the church and drawing a moral equivalence between climate change and abortion.
Labelled “heretical” by a senior fellow bishops, the 70-year-old cardinal also favors ordaining female deacons, giving communion to pro-abortion politicians and couples in irregular relationships, lax policies on immigration, and a liberal approach to both Muslim migrants and the religion of Islam generally.
Cardinal Attacks Trump on Immigration
The Holy See Press Office confirmed the papal nomination on January 6, sparking accusations that Francis’s choice of the controversial cardinal was a counterblast to Trump’s nomination of conservative Catholic Brian Burch as the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.
Vatican watchers noted that McElroy’s appointment was announced on the Feast of the Epiphany — the same day that Congress certified Trump’s reelection. McElroy will take over the Washington archdiocese from Cardinal Wilton Gregory, America’s first black cardinal.
At a press conference in Washington on Monday morning, McElroy, who for a decade has led the San Diego diocese running the length of California’s southern border with Mexico, attacked Trump’s immigration agenda, stating that plans for a “wider, indiscriminate, massive deportation across the country” would be “incompatible with Catholic doctrine.”
“I think one of the great challenges for the Church in the world at this moment is that of the care for our home on this earth, for the planet, and all of the abuse which it is suffering,” he said, responding to a question on decreasing reliance on fossil fuels.
During Trump’s first term, McElroy urged Catholics to become “disruptors” of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.
“We must disrupt those who would seek to send troops into our streets to deport the undocumented, to rip mothers and fathers from their families,” he said. “We must disrupt those who portray refugees as enemies rather than our brothers and sisters in terrible need.”
After Trump’s election victory in 2016, McElroy lamented “a profound sickness in the soul in American political life” and that it would be “unthinkable” for Catholics to “stand by while more than ten percent of our flock is ripped from our midst and deported.”
“Wolves” Among the Bishops
Faithful Catholics excoriated the pontiff’s pick of McElroy. Joseph Strickland, the former bishop of Tyler, Texas, noted that “the blatant corruption of Pope Francis and the US Cardinals is on full display with the appointment of a McCarrick clone to the same archdiocese where his evil reigned 20 years ago.
“All of us who love Jesus Christ and His Church must speak out against these wolves of the hierarchy. We cannot remain silent in the face of this blatant corruption,” as “another flock in the Church is burdened with a corrupt hireling for a shepherd,” Strickland said. “We all need the voice of St John the Baptist as we call out the brood of vipers in the Vatican.”
The traditionalist blog Messa in Latino also weighed in. “This choice feels like a childish revenge” for Trump naming conservative activist and Francis critic Brian Burch to be U.S. ambassador to the Holy See. “It is an appointment we are unafraid to call terrible.”
Fr. Paul John Kalchik linked McElroy with disgraced Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who served as archbishop of Washington from 2001 to 2006. McCarrick was defrocked in 2019 after sexually abusing multiple boys and male seminarians. “Of McCarrick’s wolves McElroy is Grima Wormtongue,” he warned. “He gives a good spiel, but it’s not the truth.”
However, progressive Catholics who share the pontiff’s ideological agenda were fulsome in their praise for the new archbishop of Washington.
Massimo Faggioli, a theologian and church historian at Villanova University, defended McElroy as “one of the most consequential appointments” of the Francis pontificate, arguing that “the Vatican wants this kind of church leader to be the archbishop of Washington right now when Trump is about to take on his promises on the deportation of immigrants.
“Many of us thought he was too progressive to be the archbishop of Washington, D.C., and that appointing him to the nation’s capital was going to be too bold, too strong a statement, because he is far more progressive than the center of the [U.S. bishops] on gay rights, synodality, immigrants, on almost anything,” Faggioli admitted.
Cardinal’s Cover-up of Satanic Sex Abuse
Clerical sex abuse whistleblower Monsignor Gene Thomas Gomulka pointed out that McElroy tried to get California legislators to overturn California Law AB 218 ,which created a three-year window for abuse victims to file claims against perpetrators. “McElroy began covering up for abusive priests as soon as he was installed as the bishop of San Diego,” he said.
The cardinal’s most infamous cover-up case is that of the sexual abuse of Rachel Maria Mastrogiacomo by Fr. Jacob Bertrand, who raped her in multiple acts of satanic ritual abuse in 2010. McElroy did not remove Father Bertrand from ministry until August 2016, after he learned that the priest was being criminally prosecuted.
“The more powerful that McElroy becomes, the more powerless I realize I am,” Mastrogiacomo posted on Facebook.
She elaborated:
Every time this man gets promoted to the highest echelons of the Church, victims are raped again and a little stay-at-home mother who chose to take a brave stand for them experiences the throes of public shame and a private agony that knows no bounds. That woman happens to be me.
In July 2016, A. W. Richard Sipe, a psychotherapist, former priest, and author of the book Celibacy in Crisis: A Secret World Revisited, hand-delivered a 13-page letter to McElroy warning him about McCarrick’s homosexual predation of seminarians. McElroy ignored the victims and refused to meet with Sipe.
McElroy also voted against the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops petition pressing the Vatican for more transparency and speed in the McCarrick investigation.
“With McElroy’s appointment to Washington, it seems that covering up abuse and bankrupting one’s diocese to the tune of $600 million does not affect one’s career at all in the Roman Catholic Church,” remarked Gene Gomulka, a former naval chaplain.
Championing the LGBTQ+ Agenda
In 2018, McElroy defended Aaron Bianco, a pastoral associate in his diocese who was in a same-sex marriage and was heading the Young Adults & Pastoral Outreach ministry at St. John the Evangelist parish.
At a “listening session,” the then-bishop of San Diego rebuked a Catholic parishioner who objected to Bianco’s ministry. “Alright, you’ve gone far enough now. You’re not going to stand here and disparage an employee of the diocese,” McElroy told the questioner. “You can leave if you’re going to do that.”
That same year, McElroy publicly refuted the way gay priests were singled out for the clergy sexual abuse crisis, saying that such abuse was a matter of power, not sexual orientation.
In 2016, McElroy was the first to offer condolences to the LGBTQ+ community after the Pulse nightclub mass shooting, saying the tragedy was “a call for us as Catholics to combat ever more vigorously the anti-gay prejudice which exists in our Catholic community and in our country.” In fact, the shooter had previously tried to attack Disneyworld, but gotten spooked by its strong security, suggesting that the club was not targeted because it was gay.
The pro-LGBTQ+ New Ways Ministry, an organization seeking to change Catholic teaching on homosexuality, hailed McElroy’s promotion, noting: “Of course, the most exciting feature about this appointment for New Ways Ministry is the cardinal’s strong positive statements regarding LGBTQ+ issues.
“Most importantly is that Cardinal McElroy has been appointed to the nation’s capital at a time when a new presidential administration and Congress have strongly indicated that legislation repealing civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ people are at the top of their agendas,” NWM stated on its website.
“Heretical” Cardinal
Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki is bishop of Springfield, Illinois. In a February 2023 essay for First Things magazine, he suggested that McElroy is a heretic.
While refraining from explicitly naming the cardinal, Paprocki wrote:
Until recently, it would be hard to imagine any successor of the apostles making such heterodox statements. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon today to hear Catholic leaders affirm unorthodox views that, not too long ago, would have been espoused only by heretics.
However, leftwing National Catholic Reporter identified the unnamed cardinal, running an article under the headline “Illinois bishop’s provocative essay suggests Cardinal McElroy is a heretic.”
“Make no mistake, Cardinal McElroy is not calling for a deepening of our doctrines or their organic development,” Catholic theologian Larry Chapp emphasized. “He is calling for their repudiation and reversal.”
In a second essay, Chapp reiterated, “McElroy is clearly trying to put the fig leaf of tradition over his naked dissent from 2,000 years of clear teaching on homosexual sex as gravely sinful.”
Slamming the cardinal’s enthusiasm for a Synod that would overturn traditional doctrine as the cardinal’s “grand deception,” Chapp noted:
In reality, what McElroy is advocating for is a synodality that is a kind of crypto Vatican III where the progressive wing of the Church will finally have their day absent the peskiness of a universal meeting of bishops in Council, and where the Holy Spirit will be, apparently, quite busy “doing a new thing.”
McElroy is one of the most highly educated prelates in America. He has a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, a licentiate in theology from the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, a doctorate in moral theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and a doctorate in political science from Stanford University.
In August 2022, Pope Francis conferred the red hat on McElroy, elevating him to the rank of cardinal.
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.